Am I doing it right? - Disc.

Hey there!
This week, after practically begging guild members to gear up alts we're heading into FL10 on an alt run, I've decided to take my disc priest and before we go I'd like to check if I've got my things in order!

I've un-reforged all my gear, but for some reason it's still showing up on the armory.

I'll be running with either Disc Priest/Paladin/Druid or Disc/Paladin/Shaman.

For 10man raiding, is there any ideal stat balance? The guides I've found are pre-4.2, and the few guides that are post 4.2 vary in information.
Some say I should balance crit/haste and reforge out of mastery to a certain extent;
others say I should stack my mastery up and up.

Also, assuming there's a lot of raid damage, would I be right in saying using PoH as a direct heal instead of pre-stacking DA is a waste of time? Its throughput seems a bit poor, instead of, for example using binding heal, which I assume in a 10man can be quite useful.

As for general healing, it seems the best way I can see of healing is through PW:S on tank(s), PoM on a tank and then GH/Penancing your way to glory?

The last time I raided as disc in new content was in Wrath, but I know shield spamming is out the window now ^^

Personally i'm AA/A spec and mostly tank healing and I go Haste > mastery > crit. I also reforge out of spirit, which is only just above 2000 but with regen trinkets (Tsunami + FoM).

PoH throughput is about as good as a holy priests in fights with continious raid dmg (beth for example). It's even better if you stack some evangelism and can pop archangel (AA/A spec)
The only time you should work on stacking DA with PoH is pre-fight... a 55k-ish shield on the whole raid at no mana cost can be extremely usefull on fights like beth and alysrazor where there's a lot of raid dmg comming right away.

You'll want to pop a PW:S at least once every 12 seconds for a rapture proc (get an addon to track the cooldown), other than that just use whichever heal will best do the job. Greater heal is our workhorse, but far from the only heal you should use. Just be smart about it

Get a 321 int trinket (core of rip etc.).
Replace 50mastery with 65 mastery on gloves.
Replace 50haste on boots with 35mastery and 8% run speed.
Replace Glyph of barrier with glyph of poh.

I'd go with an balanced stat setup for firelands, fights are very different. I would not recommend reforging out of spirit till you are sure on healing rotation. Being oom a minute before the fight ends can spell disarter.

Talentwise it looks fine. You can also opt to go with a bit more offensive built with attonement, but in the end it hardly matters as you can still throw a holy fire here or there if healing is not required, which in end would mean that your attonement was semi useless anyway.

As mentioned above you should only preshield before fights as it is a huge waste of mana in fight. Personally i'm to lazy to do it, but others find it usefull.

Priest Paladin Shaman is a comp I don't understand. Priest Shaman Druid makes much more sense, but it's still not that great.

What nonsense am I spouting? Basically, Shamans can't keep up during spike aoe, in 10 mans. They perform adequately in 25 man mode, but their AoE throughput depends a great deal on Healing Rain. Healing Rain seems balanced for 25, because despite the diminishing returns it still needs a lot of people standing in it to get good throughput.

Dig through some logs for rshams in 10 man, you will see their overall HPS on par with the other healers. But, now, take a look at the graphs - your rdruid and priest will be spiking to 35k during aoe and your rsham will be struggling to top 25k. This is bad. Anyway, i don't think that was your question.

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DA still only makes up ~25% of the healing done by PoH (after you consider glyph/mastery). That means if you precast 2 PoHs at the raid anticipating AoE, everyone gets a measly 10k aegis. That's a lot of mana for almost no gain. There is 1 fight and 1 fight only where I do this: Alysrazor during the head down phase, because of the haste buff and infinite mana. You should almost never precast PoH for DA, it's usually a bad idea. Instead, precast in an attempt to make PoH land the instant AoE goes out. This is good.

As to stat weight it's even enough that there is no clear winner; all the stats affect different parts of your spellbooks differently as disc. So it comes down to what your role is and which spells you lean more heavily on. If your absorbs are more than 45% of your overall heals, mastery is a good choice. If you tank heal and chain a lot of gheals, splitting crit and mastery is a good way to go. Or just stacking crit and haste. If your main job is raidhealing, a stacked hst>mst configuration is my preference now but some very high performers split mastery~crit.

Very situational. See any one of the endless threads, that debate has been going on since release.

you say binding heal has better hpct than poh this is patently false. My theoretical throughput for a PoH rotation mixing in shields just for rapture and penances on tank for effic is about 32k hpct. My theoretical maximum throughput for a PoH/PW:S rotation abusing BT and with all cooldowns popped at once is around 45k (which I don't think I'll ever see in a log). Binding heal only gets about 27k hpct and limits the effectiveness of your other aoe heals. During phases where damage is multi-target and spread but not aoe, bind should be the first button you press any time it won't overheal. During blanket aoe PoH with PW:S for rapture and evening.

Using binding heal during AoE is a holdover from Holy/RDruid comps. One target maxing much earlier than the rest isn't a big concern with serendipity, wild growth, sanctuary, CoH, renew, etc (so many smart heals!) doing so much work. For disc it's not nearly as good.

Priest Paladin Shaman is a comp I don't understand. Priest Shaman Druid makes much more sense, but it's still not that great.

What nonsense am I spouting? Basically, Shamans can't keep up during spike aoe, in 10 mans. They perform adequately in 25 man mode, but their AoE throughput depends a great deal on Healing Rain. Healing Rain seems balanced for 25, because despite the diminishing returns it still needs a lot of people standing in it to get good throughput.

We run a Holy Paly/Disc Priest/Restro Shaman combo and it works quite well. Healing rain works just fine for most bosses in Firelands as most of the time your going to be grouped up one way or another. Now their overall healing as a class is less than any of the other healing classes out there (I have a raiding restro shammy as well) but they are far from undesirable in a raid environment. Their strengths are Mana Tide and Spirit Link which make fights like Domo into a joke cause you have a cooldown up all the time (We have 2 pally tanks also to soak up damage as well).

You can get higher HPS by pre-shielding using PoH and timing another PoH to hit just after the attack goes off. On fights like Domo where healths can be low an extra shield can make a huge difference. Yes I know it isn't as effective as PW:Shield but it's about trying to keep people alive, and remember the mana cost of PW:S and PoH are about the same. The only difference is instead of giving 1 person a 30-40k shield I give 5 ppl a 10k shield. Depending on the situation one method is more desirable over the other. Normally I use Inner Focus for that first cast so it doesn't cost me anything. Then once the attack hits my second PoH goes off which amounts to some pretty a pretty hefty HPS spike. I've hit over 50k hps by doing that.

Course throughput and numbers are meaningless for most fights. The most important factors are the number of bosses dead. What matters is what works best for your group composition.

@OP

In most instances crit is better than haste for disc priests. This mostly has to do with our DA procs being reliant on crit. Only if your raid healing does haste have some value but even then it's stat weights are below crit. Remember that DA amounts for between 15-20% of your overall healing, you want to try and maximize that.

Me personally I try to keep Crit and Mastery about even as those 2 stats depend on each other. It would be a little silly to stack crit over mastery or mastery over crit. You need both to be effective. Haste I reforge out of and dump into Mastery/Crit (Or spirit if an item is lacking it). I'll prob keep my old T11 gear and reforge it into a haste set to play around with (also for those rare times that I go holy).

In terms of healing you have it pretty nailed down pat. Pennance every cooldown, Mending every cooldown. Greater heal for large healing, normal heal inbetween for efficiency. Pop a shield on the tank for rapture procs. The only thing I would suggest is not being shy about using PoH to proc a 10-15k DA shield on the raid if you anticipate a lot of raid damage. It's cheaper than trying to PW:S everyone (or free if you use Inner Focus), it absorbs more damage raid wide, and takes less time to cast on everyone.